Chapter Eighteen #3
Thomas sighed and stopped walking, looking around until he spotted a bush covered in large, peach-colored berries.
“Imagine each of these is a world,” he said.
He reached over and plucked a berry, holding it up for inspection.
“The Johrlac travel via concentrated, somewhat destructive mathematical means. They can bend their numbers so that inserting them into another world’s sphere of existence doesn’t rupture anything, but rather passes cleanly through.
This takes an immense amount of power and effort from the caster, as the energy consumed is either channeled through or created by the mathematician.
” He twisted his free hand, working a needle free of his shirt cuff, and slid it through the surface of the berry and out the other side.
“The punctures they make are so small as to do functionally no damage, when the math is done correctly. When done incorrectly, we get the scenarios I’ve been told the cuckoos intended to play out with Sarah shortly before my return home. Worlds end.”
He tossed me the berry. I turned it over in my hand, but a quick inspection didn’t reveal the puncture marks. Only squeezing it slightly made beads of juice form where the needle had passed.
“Okay,” I said. “Surgical and precise, got it.”
“Surgical, precise, and limited by the power the cast can generate or have fed to them. Sorcerers, on the other hand, use the pneuma they’ve collected or carried with them to fuel the crossing.
” He plucked another berry, holding it up.
“This causes more damage, but means they don’t need anyone else to feed them power.
” He picked at the delicate edge of skin left around the hole where the berry had attached to its skin, finally pulling a thin strip away.
Again, he tossed me the berry. This time, the damage was easy to see.
“It will heal, given time, but dimensional crossings are expensive for the worlds, rather than for the caster. We can still exhaust ourselves channeling that much power, but we do it on our own, without large groups to help us shape the spell. Indeed, sorcerers are more likely to experience complications when we try to work with others.”
“Sarah brought us back on her own.” But that wasn’t true, was it?
That had never been true. She’d done the math herself, but she’d bolstered it with the power and storage capacity of hundreds of minds, using them to do the brute force computing while she shaped the equation to her will.
She wouldn’t have been able to make the transition without all of us to support her.
Even Artie, although we would never know for sure whether he had been aware when he touched her that he was going to be trading his life for our ticket home.
“What about Grandma?” I asked, trying to make sense of all this. “She can’t bend pneuma.”
“Can’t even see the stuff,” she said cheerfully. “I was shocked as anything when I found out I was covered in it. Could have knocked me over with a feather.”
“If that serpentine bastard hadn’t been holding you down and flensing you alive on a regular basis, you would have been carrying enough pneuma to make yourself the most terrifying magician the worlds have ever seen,” said Thomas.
“So let’s be glad that didn’t happen,” she said, still far cheerier than she had any right to be under the circumstances.
Thomas sighed. “Your grandmother can’t manipulate pneuma, but she can be given objects, whether physical or representative, that are attuned to it and allow her to utilize what she has.
The result is almost a hybrid of the human and Johrlac methods of crossing.
Like the human, they use pneuma as a base, and work by expending it.
Like the Johrlac, they also draw from their users. ”
“That’s why I had horrible traumatic flashbacks every time I crossed dimensional walls using one of my tattoos, and why it could exhaust me so badly that I had to carry glucose packs to be sure I wouldn’t pass out before I could get to safety.
” As was almost always the case when she was describing something objectively horrible, Alice’s tone remained upbeat and even delighted with the subject.
It wasn’t the strangest defense mechanism in the family.
Thomas clearly also recognized it for what it was. He reached over and squeezed her shoulder with one hand, then looked back to me.
“Me bringing us all here was expensive in terms of pneuma consumed, and since Earth is still recovering from what the crossroads did to us, it’s better if I don’t try to repeat the process more than strictly necessary, which is why we’re not going back until we’re all together.
The Johrlac coming for your cousins was expensive in terms of risk to both the mathematician and the people powering the spell, which is why we don’t have to worry about them doing it on a regular basis.
And your grandmother going home on her own would be expensive in terms of the toll it would take on her body, which is still recovering from the beating she took getting us all out of the bottle dimension I’d been imprisoned in. ”
“Got it,” I said. “Thank you for taking the time to explain.”
“Under the circumstances, it seemed like the best way to avoid something happening that we wouldn’t be able to recover from quite as well as we could a brief delay. Now. We need to find your cousin.”
“I have a suggestion,” said Sam, slowly.
He didn’t sound happy about it. “We’ve all been wearing those charms Alice handed out since before we got here, and we know they make us basically invisible to most of the Johrlac.
Arthur didn’t have a charm, but he was in a cell designed to stop telepathic contact.
Even if none of those things are enough to stop a queen on their own, they might be enough to turn down her volume. ”
“Sam…” I began.
He held up a hand, signaling for me to let him keep going.
“I’m just saying, Annie set fire to their capital building, after they figured out Alice was here for nefarious purposes.
Pretty sure this is no longer a stealth operation, if it ever really was.
Maybe one of the people who’s more attuned to Sarah than me or Alice should take their charm off and see if they can make contact. ”
Arthur opened his mouth, already reaching behind himself to remove his charm. Before he could, I grabbed mine by the strap and heated up my hand, burning through the leather cord in a matter of seconds. The charm dropped harmlessly into my other hand, and the world of Johrlar came alive around me.
The four hums I’d already been able to hear were joined by a dozen more, the jungle harmonizing with itself.
One of those hums was discordant, a whimper of pain cutting through the chorus, and I knew from the tone of it that it was the forest, a single mind made up of all the interconnected root systems and mycelia under our feet.
This was a telepathic world, and never had I been able to understand that better than when I let myself be open to it.
And under the louder hums surrounding me, there was a thin, almost silenced tone, one muffled and deadened by some sort of barrier, one that I still knew all the way down to my bones.
Sarah had stolen my memories of her, intentionally or not, but she couldn’t change the things my flesh remembered.
My skin knew she was my cousin, barely short of a sister; my skin knew she was family, and beloved.
I heard her with my body as much as with my mind, and I knew she was here, and I knew she was captive, and I knew she needed us. More than anything else, she needed us.
“Annie?” said Sam, anxiously. “You okay, babe?”
I shushed him, then closed my eyes and turned in a circle before I stopped and pointed in the direction the hum seemed to be coming from. “She’s that way,” I said. “Over there.”
“One small problem, pumpkin,” said Alice. “That way takes us back toward the building you set on fire.”
“Maybe it’s done being on fire by now,” I said. “We know she wasn’t there when we were inside. They must have her someplace nearby.”
“That, or they moved her while we were walking,” suggested Arthur. “Annie’s the only person here who’s better at picking up on Sarah than I am. If she says that’s the way, then that’s the way. I trust her.”
“Thank you,” I said, still pointing. “Sarah’s this way. I think she’s behind some kind of dampener, but it’s not quite strong enough to block her out completely.”
“All right,” said Alice. “Lead the way.”
Traveling back through the jungle without the speed added by Sam’s panicked flight slowed us down considerably.
We’d been walking for what felt like over an hour before the air began smelling of smoke again, and shortly after that, we emerged into a clearing that had clearly burned, and recently.
Ropes of foamy white clung to the newly crisped foliage around us, having been used to control and extinguish the blaze, and Arthur yelped as he tried to keep walking.
I turned to look back at him. He grimaced sheepishly.
“Ground’s still hot,” he explained.
“Let me get that,” said Thomas. He raised and then lowered his right hand, a stern expression on his face. Arthur watched this with wide eyes, and when Thomas beckoned, he once again tried to step into the clearing. His eyes widened with surprise, and he kept on going.
“The ground’s cool now,” he said. “I thought you could just make fire happen, not cool things down.”
“Wait until you get to experience one of your grandmother’s holiday dinners,” said Thomas. “As soon as she realized I could shunt the heat away from objects as well as summon it, she threw out all her trivets and declared roast roc a reasonable substitute for turkey.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Thomas,” said Alice. “It took at least a year before I believed you wouldn’t freeze my gravy doing that.”